In 2011, President and founder of Valve famously said that piracy isn’t a problem of price, it’s a problem of service. But what do the problems facing the western anime and manga scene have to do with PC gaming? A lot honestly.
In recent years, the anime and manga industry in the west has been coming to terms with its own problems of piracy, localization, and the quality of their service. As a result, piracy sites are considered the go-to for many fans when faced with financially supporting publishers who allow localizers to editorialize someone else’s work, or worse, try and make it “better” instead of localizing in good faith.
Earlier this year, Daromeon, the creator of the Kengan franchise (Kengan Ashura, Kengan Omega) discussed how he entrusted the localization of his work to an amateur team of fans. Luckily the publisher went with Daromeon’s recommendation and hired the fans.
In an interview with Bounding Into Comics, Daromeon explained the situation:
The first translation I saw was good enough as a translation, like if it was made as part of an English exam for school, but it was unnatural to read. I had to print out both what they showed me and the piracy version and show it to my editor side-by-side in order to explain just how much smoother the fan translation was than the ‘official’ copy.
The initial translation was done by AI, but still, Daromeon’s instinct to entrust the project to fans has seemingly paid off. Kengan Ashura has received multiple anime seasons after partnering with Netflix and he could be a harbinger for a closer relationship between pirates and legitimate publishers.
Here’s where Gabe Newell’s philosophy of piracy as a service problem comes in; fans are more enthusiastic than ever to support creators, and increasingly that means going to Japanese publishers directly. Sometimes, it’s because the series hasn’t been picked up in the west, but it also happens when the localization and English publisher has lost the good faith of the fans.
When fans can support creators by buying merch or importing the Japanese books while reading pirate sites, why would they ever give money to the official localization?
So when fans are willing to spend their time and money tracking down ways to support their favorite series without supporting localizers, it becomes apparent that just as Newell says: “Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem”.
It’s our belief that publishers who localize into English could both improve their image and revenue by giving the fans what they’re asking for: good faith localizations that respect the source material and fans.
We can already see what’s happening when they don’t satisfy the needs of fans, AI translation is on the rise, and when it’s not only being tolerated, but celebrated.
Ending on a positive note, it behooves us as English-speaking fans to at least acknowledge when localizers and publishers do well, for anime we recommend HI-DIVE and for manga Yen Press is willing to publish spicier titles with few to no censorship issues.
